In My Father's Shadow (22 page)

I had also come to seen Alain through my father’s eyes. He had taken the two of us to lunch in a smart bistro near Avenue Foch, where Alain lived with his family in a grand apartment. “He’s a sweet boy,” my father told me afterward, “and very good looking, but I’m not sure he’s bright enough for you.” I realized with a pang that my father was right. Yet Alain was still the brother I wished I had and my closest male friend.

On returning to Florissant in early January, I learned I had been moved up into the second French class from the top and that my mother and Jackie were delighted with my excellent marks and swift progress. As a reward, I was to resume piano lessons. My new piano teacher was aghast at my poor technique and insisted on scales, scales, scales, and endless finger exercises before I was allowed to begin a new piece. I liked her, though. She was a cheery soul who smiled often, showing the gap between her front teeth, and wore her carrot red hair in a fringe. She also had the creepy habit of wearing her dead husband’s ties.

“Fringette,” as I privately called her, risked losing her job when she invited me to her home on the pretext of hearing some recordings of a Beethoven sonata I was about to learn and introduced me instead to her nephew. She knew as well as I did that it was strictly forbidden for Florissant girls to meet or socialize with men from the area, yet she had obviously arranged for her nephew to drop by. “My nephew has been so anxious to meet the daughter of Orson Welles,” Fringette exclaimed while he pumped my hand, a stocky, oily-haired young man in his midtwenties. I hated being introduced as “the daughter of” as much as I distrusted the instant friendliness of those who wanted to meet me for my father’s sake. When Fringette suggested to her
nephew that he take me “for a little drive,” I did not know how to get out of it without sounding rude. So there I was, driving off with The Nephew in his sleek sports car, while Fringette called out, “This is an excellent opportunity to practice your French, Christophare.”

It was a wintry but brilliantly sunny day. A few miles down the road, it dawned on me that here I was, alone in a car with a fully grown
man
. But why did he have to be so unappealing? If I were to run my hands through his hair, I would need to wash them. He looked so stodgy and old beyond his years. I could not picture him doing any of the risqué things I read about in French novels. “If anyone from Florissant sees me in your car, I’ll probably be expelled,” I told him in an effort to inject a hint of danger into the dullness accumulating in the car, but he looked at me as though I had said, “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” Then he began asking incessant questions about Orson Welles. These I answered halfheartedly and with a growing sense of shame. Why did I know so little of what my father had been doing in Europe these past years? Until The Nephew mentioned it, I had not even known (although I pretended to) that
Othello
had won the top prize at the Cannes Festival in May of 1952, nearly two years ago. Why hadn’t my father told me of this triumph himself? He was so modest in private, so reluctant to discuss — at least with me—the many projects that relentlessly occupied him.

As we drove ever deeper into the woods, I kept trying to change the subject, exclaiming over the soaring Alps or pointing out a deer that was bounding away through the bare trees. Suddenly The Nephew stopped the car and roughly pulled me toward him, but I pushed him away with equal violence. He was not going to boast to all his Swiss friends that he had made love to “the daughter of.” After a brief struggle, he let me go, then drove me back to Ouchy in silence, letting me out at a discreet distance from the
pensionnat
. And that was the last I saw of him.

“D
ADDY DEFINITELY WANTS
me to stay with him for Easter, and I am delighted. I am never happier than when I am with my charming but thoroughly irresponsible father,” I wrote my grandparents a few weeks before my sixteenth birthday.

It had been drilled into me since early childhood that my father was “irresponsible,” especially when it came to contributing toward my support. How many times had I heard from my mother and others that his child support payments had been woefully inadequate? How often was it pointed out that
without the generosity of Charlie Lederer, who had set up a trust fund for my mother at the time of their divorce, I would not be attending Florissant? The chorus of indignant elders proclaiming Orson Welles to be a “thoroughly irresponsible father” was so loud that it drowned out any efforts I made to come to his defense. And much as I wanted to defend him, I had my own childhood memories of standing in the front hall, all dressed up and waiting to be taken to lunch by a father who did not appear.

There was no one in my life at that time to take his side, no one to point out to me that because of his difficulties in finding financial backing for his films, he was often forced to come up with the money himself. In a real sense, he was one of the first independent filmmakers who, apart from the handful of films he made in Hollywood, worked entirely outside the studio system. During his years in Europe, no matter how it might appear to my mother and others who saw him living it up in luxury hotels, he had little available cash to spend on me or himself. But when he could spare the little he had, he shared it with me.

When I joined my father in Madrid during my Easter vacation, he was in the middle of making
Mr. Arkadin
. “Daddy is working very hard on his new picture, which I think, after seeing the rushes, will be his best,” I wrote the Hills. We were staying at the Ritz, a grand Old World hotel, the kind my father preferred, in the center of Madrid. “It’s going to be a brilliant film,” I rattled on. “The star is an unknown actor called Robert Arden. He has so much talent that Daddy has signed him for a seven-year contract.” (I had a terrific crush on Bob Arden—his New York accent and his gangster good looks—whereas he was no more than polite to Orson’s kid.)

The Ritz was within walking distance of the Prado museum, and here my father took me on our first morning together to see an exhibit of Goya’s etchings. I noticed his face was rosy with pleasure and that he walked beside me with a buoyant step, puffing away on his cigar. He was altogether more light-hearted than he had been in Paris last Christmas. “Why are you so happy, Daddy?”

“I’m always happy when I’m with you, darling girl.”

“I feel the same when I’m with you, Daddy, but you seem
particularly
happy today.”

He laughed. “How observant you are, Christopher. Well, I’m finally making another movie of my own, after years of bad luck and having to earn my living on the radio or in the theater or any damned way I can.” He explained
the BBC had been his “bread and butter” and given him a lot of work, beginning with a half-hour radio show called
The Adventures of Harry Lime
which featured the character he had famously played in
The Third Man
. “I’m also starting to get some work in television,” he went on, “but enough of all that. Right now I’m in Spain, my favorite country in the world, and taking my beautiful daughter to the Prado. It doesn’t get any better than this.”

Now
I
was rosy-cheeked and beaming as we walked through the majestic doors of the Prado and down to the medieval gloom of its basement. Here a rare exhibit of Goya’s etchings was on display, and I will never forget seeing
Los Caprichos
for the first time with my father beside me, translating the Spanish captions, illuminating their sardonic humor, pointing out Goya’s attacks on the clergy and society’s brutal treatment of women in eighteenth-century Spain. “Goya had to be very careful, though, because of the Inquisition,” my father explained, “and that’s why he sometimes drew goblins and witches instead of real people and invented a nightmarish vision to make his point.”

I was overwhelmed. Never had I seen anything so terrifying and yet so beautiful and brutally honest at the same time. “So you aren’t sorry I brought you here,” my father teased, clearly delighted by my response to
Los Caprichos
, “and you won’t blame me if you have nightmares tonight?” I shook my head, too overcome to speak, and around the exhibit we went again, singling out those etchings that charmed us the most with their black humor.

On another afternoon, my father took me to my first bullfight. I knew how much he loved bullfighting, and I tried hard to love it also, but when the picadors came riding out in their splendid costumes, the horses half rearing as they closed in on the bull, and then the riders plunged their swords deep into the bull’s back, it was too much for me. I covered my eyes. “They have to do that to lower the bull’s head,” my father told me a shade impatiently. “Otherwise the bull would be too dangerous.” He was completely caught up in the spectacle, shouting “Olé” as loudly as our neighbors. “Did you see that?” he exclaimed after the matador executed a pass with his cape that drew another roar from the crowd. In spite of my revulsion, I could see how graceful and daring the matador was, befuddling the bull with his cape until he wore him out. At last, blood streaming down its flanks, the bull came to a standstill and stood there waiting to be killed.

“Well, what do you think of bullfighting?” my father asked after the bull’s dead body had been dragged out of the arena.

“I tried hard to like it, but I felt awfully sorry for the bull.”

“What about the matador? Did you feel sorry for him?”

“No. He had a sword and could defend himself.”

“And what if the bull had gored him? Every time a matador steps into the ring, he’s risking his life, you know, no matter how great he is. A bullfight is like a dance with death, and the spectators don’t know until the end whether death will claim the bullfighter or the bull.”

But that’s horrible
, I wanted to say. Although I would again accompany my father to the bullfights when we visited Barcelona, trying hard to see “the dance with death” through his eyes, I was never able to share his enthusiasm.

On the other hand, when my father took me one evening to a small, smoke-filled restaurant in the back streets of Madrid where after midnight the tables were pushed to the walls to make room for a spontaneous eruption of flamenco, I became an instant aficionada. A man dressed in tight black pants and an open-necked black shirt began strumming his guitar, gently at first, like a slow caress, but gradually increasing the tempo until he was lashing and pounding his instrument as though it were a war drum. Hearing such wild, imperious rhythms, it was impossible not to stamp our feet, clap our hands, and sway in our chairs. Then another man, also dressed like someone going to a funeral, began to sing. He, too, started slowly, softly, but soon his song was infused with passion; then it became a strident cry on the edge of pain and yet strangely beautiful. During a break, my father watched approvingly while I wiped my eyes. “It’s all in the music,” he reflected, “the knowledge of tragedy, the acceptance of death, so imbedded in the Spanish soul. That’s one reason I love Spain so much and could see myself living here. They’re on such intimate terms with death in this country, and it gives them a kind of nobility and depth of character you don’t find anywhere else … Ah, here come the dancers!”

I was surprised that the female dancer was middle-aged and bulging out of her costume until she began to dance. Then the years and the pounds fell away. I saw only grace and sensuous movement, a swirl of red skirts as the dancer clicked her castanets and stamped her feet in time to the frenetic guitar. Other dancers, male and female, were wonderful to watch, but none of them moved me as much as the flamenco singer who had given me my first glimpse into the Spanish soul.

At breakfast the next morning, my father announced that he was taking
me to Toledo for the day. “Are we going on location for
Mr. Arkadin?
” I asked, secretly hoping that Bob Arden might be driving to Toledo with us.

“No, we’re going to see the El Grecos,” my father answered. “His paintings are scattered all over the world, but his greatest work — at least I think it’s his greatest—is in a church in Toledo, and I can’t let you leave Spain without having seen it.”

“Which work is that?”

“
The Burial of Count Orgaz
. There’s also an El Greco museum—the whole of Toledo is a museum, in fact. The town’s been declared a national monument, you know, which means they can’t build anything new or tear down anything old. If El Greco were to return today, he might be horrified by the traffic, but he’d recognize the skyline he painted so beautifully and the town where he lived for forty years.”

As I soon saw for myself, Toledo rose on a succession of hills and steep cliffs high above the Tagus River. Like every fortified hill town built in medieval Spain, it was completely surrounded by monumental walls. Its streets were narrow and cobblestoned, so narrow in places that people on opposite balconies could lean out and shake hands. Potted geraniums spilled over the wrought iron balconies, splashing the ancient stones with a profusion of pink, crimson, white, and purple blossoms. Toledo had been the capital of Spain, my father told me, until 1560, but by the time El Greco arrived, sometime in the 1570s, the capital had been transferred to Madrid. “We know very little about El Greco’s life except that he came from Greece,” my father continued, “and that is as it should be.”

“Why?”

“What should matter the most to us is a man’s art and not how he lived his life. People today scrutinize an artist’s personality, crowing over his mistakes, his human failings, and don’t care enough about what he produced.” I couldn’t help feeling that my father was talking about himself. It was also dawning on me that my father was sharing his enthusiasms and ideas in the hope of enlarging my knowledge and broadening my view of the world.

We went directly to the church of Santo Tomé to see El Greco’s masterpiece. We stood a long while, admiring the scene, which covers an entire wall, of the funeral of a now forgotten Spanish nobleman. The painting is divided into two halves representing heaven and earth. In heaven Christ is surrounded by angels, saints, and saved souls in a blaze of blue sky. On earth the dead body of the handsome count, suited in armor, is being tenderly lifted by
the vicar and another clergyman. Behind them stands a crowd of aristocratic onlookers in black suits with pearly white ruffs around their necks. Most are dark-haired men with long, pointed faces. They have mustaches and goatees, and all look more solemn than sad.